“Parody” accounts attacking women are a sign of the truly desperate and pathetic.

There has been a recent proliferation in the number of ‘parody’ accounts created with the deliberate intent of harassing, abusing and silencing women. These accounts directed at women who challenge heteronormativity, hyper-masculinity, and the objectification and pornification of culture are not ‘parodies’, nor are they satire. They are abusive and violent attacks on the work of individual women and the deliberate silencing of all women. These are not made by people who care about women’s safety and health. They are made by the utterly pathetic willing to sell out other women in a desperate attempt to get male approval.

If your ‘parody’ account uses racism, homophobia, classism, disablism or misogyny in order to attack a woman, you aren’t engaged in either satire or parody. What you are doing is replicating the same patriarchal, white supremacist structures which actively harm women. An excellent example of this is the utterly pathetic UK Feminist twitter account set up as a ‘parody’ of radical feminism by a group of deeply abusive people which included a tremendous amount of racist language and theory, including a rather vicious smear of the work of Kimberle Crenshawe and bell hooks. Now, they can whinge all they want that it was a ‘joke’ but ‘jokes’ which replicate white supremacist language are nothing of the sort. They are racism.

There is a huge difference between critical engagement with a woman’s politics and abusive behaviour. Setting up ‘parody’ accounts to insult and denigrate women you disagree with is abusive behaviour. It’s also sigh of how piss-poor your own politics are, if the only way you can think of to engage with a woman you disagree with is by being an asshole.

And, if you are too dim to decide for yourself what crosses the line between personal attack and satire, perhaps you may want to rethink your presence on social media.

One thought on ““Parody” accounts attacking women are a sign of the truly desperate and pathetic.”

I agree entirely with you Louise. I have to keep taking time off twitter because I am so tired of the attacks on women from other women.
The spare of parody accounts are yet another example of women who just don’t get feminism. I think we’re all pretty sure who’s behind them and they are, without a doubt, hateful abusive people who demonstrate obsessive and misogynistic behaviour. There is no excuse for it and, no matter what they may throw at Radical feminism, it’s clear that that really don’t get it.
We’ve got their number and, in the case of some, their names and addresses too.
Soon, this will stop.